Regulating the Internet

The cost is descending and will continue to. The architecture was constructed to be naturally competitive, so that no one entity could get too far out of line from the prevailing market price.

This information revolution may rival the inventions of the printing press and broadcasting in terms of how it will affect our daily lives … But there are some dark side roads on the information superhighway that contain material that would be considered unacceptable by any reasonable standard.

Regulating the Internet

We want to make sure there’s no electronic caste system, that every child and school has the access and the ability to manipulate information. There will be incredible resistance from the companies, but there will be a strong public backlash against the members of Congress who vote for this deregulation bill after everyone’s phone and cable bills start creeping up.

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

Every machine you see here will be trucked out and buried in a landfill, and never spoken of again, within a dozen years … The values are what matters. The values are the only things that last, the only things that *can* last. Hack the hardware, not the Constitution. Hold on tight to what matters, and just hack the rest. I used to think that cyberspace was 50 years away. What I thought was 50 years away, was only 10 years away. And what I thought was 10 years away – it was already here. I just wasn’t aware of it yet.

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition. Computers won’t be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise bit-factories swallowing your entire desk. They will tuck under your arm, into your valise, into your kid’s backpack. After that, they’ll fit onto your face, plug into your ear. And after that – they’ll simply melt. They’ll become fabric. What does a computer really need? Not glass boxes – it needs thread – power wiring, glass fiber-optic, cellular antennas, microcircuitry. These are woven things. Fabric and air and electrons and light. Magic handkerchiefs with instant global access. You’ll wear them around your neck. You’ll make tents from them if you want. They will be everywhere, throwaway. Like denim. Like paper. Like a child’s kite. This is coming a lot faster than anyone realizes.

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

In the future I expect the commercial sector to target little children with their full enormous range of online demographic databases and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and there every day, peering at our children through a cyberspace one-way mirror … We need to make some conscious decisions to reinvent our information technology as if the future mattered. As if our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery.

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

I believe that the national adventure you now propose is of quite extraordinary importance. Historians of the future – provided good dreams prevail – will view this as having been far more crucial to the survival of democracy in the United States than rural electrification or the space program.

Cyberspace 2020

Cyberspace is defined and delineated first and foremost by its content. And its future depends not on our ability to police it, but rather upon what we collectively build there that is of real public assistance and social value.